Brio-Trio. The brioches with what inside.
The cold season is here and with it holidays, when people eat a lot. In addition, shops are then closed and you don’t necessarily want to go outside anyway – Exactly the right time to think about products for the freezer again.
Most recently, we did that with Cong You Bing. These crispy pancakes were a very popular snack at our agency. How can we build on this success?
Pizza is one of the most popular frozen snack products, but simply creating another pizza variant is not what we have in mind. Nevertheless, pizza has inspired us. More precisely, pizza cupcakes.
Beyond Pizza
But for us it’s not about pizza, but about a dough base that can be varied as desired. So that we have a lot of variety in our freezer with just one pack. The dough should be fluffy, juicy and buttery. This base with a recess in the middle can be varied as required as a “natural” version or it can be stored in different types on the freezer shelf. The brios can be baked in the oven with part of the packaging that doubles as baking paper.
Double D’oh!
For the dough we follow two approaches. A classic brioche supplemented with sourdough to combine sweet and savory flavors, and a potato dough set with dry yeast. Adapted from a bread from a Copenhagen restaurant, which is particularly fluffy and juicy. This mixture is then fermented for two days in the refrigerator. We try both doughs and then choose the one that suits us.
As expected, the brioche cupcakes with sourdough are fluffy and fine-pored. The sourdough gives the brioche a certain flavor without being too prominent.
The potato dough is easy to make and doubles in volume after two days in the refrigerator. It has a nice porosity, but is doughier and heavier compared to the brioche dough. We bake both doughs in a standard muffin tin. The dough pieces weigh about 50 g. The doughs are baked at 180 degrees top/bottom heat for 20 minutes. It can be observed that the brioche rises, cracks and gets a nice crust. The potato dough, on the other hand, remains more compact. After cooling, the potato is sticky and very moist, while the brioche is soft, fluffy and slightly drier.
Moist and juicy is good – unfortunately not compact and sticky. We therefore decide to continue working with the brioche and increase the sourdough content a little.
Brio trio
Now it’s about the flavor combinations. Christmas and New Year’s Eve are our ideas, so the Brios are perfect for a Christmas party or as a party snack. The winter edition contains double cheese (raclette and Gruyère), duck and red cabbage and, as a sweet finish, apple-nut-cinnamon. We cut the cheese into cubes and press it into the dough, we stew the duck and pluck the pulled-duck and fill it with the red cabbage in the brioche. We cut the apples into large pieces and mix them into the batter with cinnamon, sugar and walnuts.
The Brios are baked at 180 degrees top / bottom heat for 20 minutes. Due to the heavy filling, the dough does not rise very much, but it still has a soft and fluffy pore.
Our Brio-Trio can now go into the freezer and is ready for winter game nights, Christmas parties or simply the hunger in between.
